church decline

We Only See the Light in Darkness: Sermon Preached on 29th January 2023 (Candlemas Transferred)

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A 13th Century drawing of Mary and Joseph presenting the infant Jesus to Simeon at the Temple in Jerusalem - or at least what a 13th Century artist thought that looked like - while Anna worships and nine onlookers watch.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Hebrews 2. 14-18; Matthew 2. 22-40

“…a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

Today’s Gospel reading is set in a time when faith was thin and political realities were grim. Corruption and oppression reigned in the land but those most committed to change were often fanatical and violent. Religious leaders seemed more interested in power and privilege than praising God. It was a time and a place, in other words, like many others and not entirely different from our own.

Some did keep faith in these difficult circumstances – Mary and Joseph were two such people, presenting their baby son in the Temple for purification on the fortieth day after His birth as the Law of Moses required. The idea that ritual purification after birth might be important has become remote to us in recent generations. It can therefore surprise us that Candlemas, which we keep today as the feast that commemorates Christ being presented in the Temple, was one of the earliest Christian festivals and remains one of the most important.

A 13th Century drawing of Mary and Joseph presenting the infant Jesus to Simeon at the Temple in Jerusalem - or at least what a 13th Century artist thought that looked like - while Anna worships and nine onlookers watch.
Giotto, The Presentation of Christ (c. 1311).

Mary and Joseph were not the only people keeping the faith in those hard times. Simeon and Anna spent their lives deep in prayer and close to God. So much so that Simeon was led by the Holy Spirit to the infant Christ and knew he was the long-promised Messiah; Anna also knew the child was specially sent by God without anyone telling her. It is interesting that they were both very elderly, given that the elderly are often held to be of not much account in a world that is obsessed with vigour and power and achievement; but God has a more generous standard than the world of who is valuable and who is fit to do His work. The old are as valuable to Him as the young.

The marginal are also as valuable to God as those in the centre of things. God chose to become a human being in the person of Jesus Christ – not as a king, and not in one of the world’s power centres, but as the son of a woman who became pregnant in suspicious circumstances, to be raised as the son of an artisan, belonging to a people under a foreign occupation they bitterly resented.

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A Few Wise Men: Sermon Preached on Friday 6th January 2023 (The Epiphany)

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Preached at St John’s Devizes, and on Sunday 8th January at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend

Isaiah 60.1-6; Matthew 2.1-12

“Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…”

Epiphany (1940) by Max Ernst.

The Epiphany is the fourth most important date in the Church’s year, after Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost. Yet it is often neglected by secular society, and church-goers don’t generally turn out in great numbers for Epiphany services in my experience. Yet it’s a feast of great significance because, with Christ still in His cradle, it established Christianity as an explicitly universalising religion: by that, I mean one that seeks to make followers of people of every nation and language, rather than just from the Palestinian Jewish community who supplied Christ’s followers while He was on earth.

A lot is going on in our two readings this evening, so let me try to unpack some of it.

The fact that these men are identified by St Matthew as coming from the East, specifically, has interesting implications. The East was a place associated with wisdom and spiritual insight. The Wise Men are being identified by Matthew not as any old gentiles but some of the holiest and most intellectually gifted representatives of the entire gentile world. They already know that the new-born child they seek is destined to be king. In contrast, Herod, the temporal king of the Jews, is spiritually blind. This short-sighted and intolerant man can’t see anything in the arrival of these foreign visitors beyond a potential threat to his power. Wisdom and holiness do not come through ancestry: early in his story of Jesus’ life, Matthew has established an important principle.

Yet there is an obvious tension between universalism and the particular here. If Christianity is a universal religion, one might ask why Jesus should have been born as a Jew, as a male, in the Holy Land, in the 1st Century. Why there, and then, and in the form of this little baby born of Mary? Part of the answer must be that if Christian faith truly does encapsulate God’s plan for humanity, then God had to become human as someone in particular. None of us are blank slates. All of us have a culture and a heritage, and no single one of us can be everyman or everywoman. Indeed love can only truly be love if it is directed towards someone or something in particular; love in the abstract remains something unconsummated and unfulfilled.

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Waiting Patiently: Sermon Preached on 11th December 2022 (The Third Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – James 5: 7–10; Matthew 11: 2–11

“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”

The other day, I tried to order one of those little plastic ice scrapers for the car from Amazon, partly so that I could be sure of getting here to take this service this morning! Given the pre-Christmas rush, I couldn’t get one to arrive before the middle of next week.

“How dare they”, I fumed inwardly to myself, “I’m an Amazon Prime member specifically so I can get deliveries of almost anything I need overnight. Just because they’re busy, and just because half the factories in China have been shut for most of this year, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have nearly anything I need within 24 hours!”

A snowy scene as I left St Peter’s, Poulshot, after preaching this sermon.

Patience is a virtue: but not one I have ever been much possessed of! The structure of modern society doesn’t help, with its promise that it can satisfy any of our wants almost instantaneously. Yet fulfilling most needs more significant than an ice-scraper or a case of wine demands patience, and can’t be done with a few clicks on a website.

By the time John the Baptist came along, some strands of Jewish opinion were waiting with impatient fervour for a Messiah, a religious-political leader who they believed would remove the Roman occupiers and usher in a new political order of justice and righteousness in a godly independent state.

Now, Matthew’s Gospel identified Jesus as the Messiah in its very first sentence, and it does so again in this morning’s Gospel reading. But that is something intended for those, like us, reading the story much later: in the action of the story, even Jesus’ closest followers have not worked out his true identity by this point. When, shortly afterwards, Peter does work out that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus orders the disciples “sternly” not to tell anyone. The time was not yet ripe.

The messages that pass between John and Jesus here are interesting in that light. Firstly, John the Baptist, in prison at the hands of Herod Antipas, asks “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” So, despite the fact nothing could possibly be better news for John in those terrible circumstances than to hear that Jesus, the man he baptised in the Jordan, is the Messiah, he is prepared to wait if the time is not yet ripe for God to send it.

Another interesting thing is that Jesus doesn’t simply say that He is the Messiah. Instead, he asks John’s messengers to relay news of his miracles and says “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.” Jesus presents the evidence of what he is doing in the world, but respects John’s right to make up his own mind about his nature in good faith. Whether or not he accepts that Jesus is the Messiah, he will be blessed if he takes no offence Him.

There is a lot in this exchange that chimes with our experience of how God interacts with humanity in our world. The evidence of God’s existence is all around us. Maybe it is possible, in the vastness of the universe, that some lengthy sequence of random events led to the existence not only of life, but intelligent, self-aware life, with a sense of morality.

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Recapturing the Imagination of Our Culture: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 26th June 2022 (Patronal Festival)

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Readings – Isaiah 40: 1–11; Luke 1:57–66, 80

A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’

Some of you will by now know of my fondness for financial crisis movies. One, called The Big Short, tells the tale of the few who saw in advance the coming American mortgage crash of the late 2000s. They were a ragbag collection of outsiders – an autistic genius, bright young things with no stake in the system, and even a man so honest about his own greed that had no illusions about the probity of others. They were scoffed at for years, but they were right, and betting against the market made them earthly riches at the very moment when others were losing their shirts.

A photo of Christian Bale acting as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short.
Eccentrically brilliant – Christian Bale as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short.

Outsiders often perceive truths too disturbing for those comfortable with the existing order. Yet the line between genius and madness can be thin and it can be hard to tell those voices crying profound truths into the wilderness apart from the cacophony of those howling at the Moon. Is it is always safest to herd ourselves behind conventional wisdom, because then at least if we are wrong, we will have plenty of company in our mistakes.

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Our first reading presents us with a vision of God nurturing and feeding His people after a time of trouble. This is from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, the introduction to the second of Isaiah’s three distinct blocks of writing, and it was written in Babylon, probably towards the end of the half century of exile from Jerusalem. It sought to reassure people who had suffered much for their faith that God had not given up on them and would soon allow them to return home.

One verse is quite difficult and often glossed over. While Jerusalem’s “penalty is paid” that is because “she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.” There is no attempt here to avoid the idea that the exiles, mostly from the ruling elite of Jerusalem, were themselves largely responsible for their own misfortune. Instead of justice, they chose selfishness, idolatry, and the path of least resistance. They silenced and persecuted those who told them difficult truths they didn’t want to hear. They had lost the Kingdom and they had blinking well deserved it.

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